


fridge light flickers

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Coming Out, Developing Relationship, First Kiss, M/M, Meteorstuck, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:07:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26252389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: That’s stupid, though. You know how these things work—with Rose and Kanaya joined at the hip, Terezi and Vriska so inseparable they’ve synched up their sleeping schedules down to the minute, and Gamzee fucking around in the ventilation system like the ginormous creep he’s rapidly becoming, Dave’s options for someone to kill time with have been reduced to you and you alone. There’s nothing special about this, and there isn’t any reason you should want there to be, either. You are in the right place at the right time, as is he for you. End of the story.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 10
Kudos: 139





	fridge light flickers

**Author's Note:**

> more davidcat because erm idk im crazy and insane <3 listened to carry me by the original crooks and nannies a lot while writing this (thats where the title is from) so give that a listen if ur looking 2 set the mood of this ! enjoy :-]

The first time you succumb to boredom is when you realize you might actually be out of the woods.

From the moment you set foot on the meteor, the Green Sun burning a hole through the universe at your back, the humans armed with Sollux's dead body bearing down your front, you resign yourself to the fact that highly-strung is just a new state of being you're probably going to occupy for the next sweep and a half straight. There's a moment where, in between Aradia's ass-backward tirades about corpse parties and the weird, blank looks Strider keeps shooting you every time you so much as open your mouth to breathe, where you consider just not giving a fuck anymore. Certainly, it's not the most unfounded of choices: whatever happened in the past is unchangeable—shitty and totally on your head as it may be—and whatever's going to happen in the future is way more out of your hands than you'd ever like to admit, so there's not much logic behind making the conscious choice to spend the next sweep and a half worrying yourself sick over every infinitesimal problem your thinkpan can cough up. That would be miserable, and it's not like you want to be miserable.

But Kanaya stands too close to your side, green light lining the cracks in the glasses still pushed firmly up the bridge of her nose, and you can still see the cerulean stains on Terezi's gloves even though you know she had spent a solid ten minutes trying to clean them off. And, of course, it only takes Gamzee thirty minutes before he decides to disappear, trailing purple blood down the hallways as his figure disappears into the darkness, discombobulated honks fading out alongside him.

And you never found Nepeta's body, or Equius's, so maybe it's less about making yourself miserable and more about keeping everyone else alive. Maybe it's some masochistic form of penance, too; after all, it doesn't take anything even vaguely resembling a genius to connect the dots of the shitstorms that went down on the veil. There are no tangents about it—not as many as you wish there were, at least—and no matter how many different angles you try to see things from—whether at Kanaya's insistence, or Terezi's, or even your own—the lines always lead back to you.

Which is to say, it was your fault. Maybe not everything, but certainly enough of it to necessitate you shouldering the burden of running around trying to keep the team together even as it fractures along the middle mere days into your journey. You harangue people via Trollian, set up memo after memo you are at least eighty five percent certain no one reads, schedule training sessions and strategy meetings and even the occasional team dinner because, hey, what the fuck else are you supposed to do, really? It's sort of hard to ignore the fact that any cohesion the six of you could ever hope to maintain is pretty much doomed from the start, but you'll be fucked if you don't at least try.

So try you do, and if you're a little more pissed off or disappointed when your efforts fall through spectacularly in nearly every respect—scratch that, you're about a hundred and fifty percent certain no one is reading the memos—than appropriate, you do your best not to think about it. Certainly, no one else brings it up, so after a while, you do dial back the efforts and let all hopes of group unity fuck themselves off into the furthest recesses of deep space.

You tell yourself you're not bitter about the lack of authority you're able to exercise over your companions, and it doesn't feel like a total lie. You tell yourself that you're not bitter you're the one left at the end of it all, almost completely alone save for a morail who makes it abundantly clear he doesn't even notice you're there half the time, much less give a shit that you bothered to show up, and it's a little harder to believe. But whatever. If the boredom—the loneliness, your thinkpan offers up every time this train of thought kicks up, and you ignore it just as strenuously each time—comes hand-in-hand with the fact that you get to finally stop fucking stressing about every single thing you possibly could, you think you'll take it.

And there's always the comforting notion that you aren't dead, at least. Bored out of your fucking skull, sure, but very much alive, and that definitely can't be said for a lot of your friends.

Though thinking like that always feels like a slippery slope—blah, blah, blah, everyone died and it's all your fault—so you do your best not to, and instead devote your time to finding new and creative ways to keep yourself occupied at all hours.

You're successful for a handful of pedigrees—though it's not so much you keeping yourself entertained as it is —but before you know it, you've hit rock bottom.

Which is to say, you finally suck it up and go to Can Town.

Terezi isn't there when you arrive, which is simultaneously the best and worst-case scenario that could've possibly taken place. You're spared a full three and a half seconds for feeling like total shit because of it before Strider materializes right in front of you. His face is slate blank as he tips his head at you, arms folded loosely across his chest. The dull grey light that seems to permeate every single room on the meteor glints off the rims of his glasses, bouncing back into your eyes. For a second, neither of you speak.

He's the one to break the silence. "Yo."

"Hey."

"'Sup?"

You consider being direct with him for a second—explaining that you've barely gotten a fraction of the way through your total journey time and you're already going up the fucking wall with boredom—but that feels like giving him too much power, somehow, so you opt for an eye roll and a long-suffering sigh instead. "You haven't shut up about this place since the second we all got here, pretty much, so I figured it's about time I come and see what you've been kissing your own ass about."

"Huh." His eyebrows raise fractionally. "Impressed yet?"

You toss a baleful glance over at the tower to your right, a stack of cans that looks like it's being kept upright through sparsely-placed duct tape and sheer force of will alone. "Impressed being a relative term, sure."

"For what?"

"Totally fucking underwhelmed."

"Ouch."

He sounds so monotone you almost laugh. Almost. You feel like doing so would be giving him too much power, too. "Yeah, yeah, don't shit yourself over it."

"Damn." The corner of his mouth twitches a little. "Little late for that, dude. Got any spare god jammies on you?"

You roll your eyes again. "Is this all you do with your time? Play with cans like some brain-dead wiggler?"

"You talk a lotta smack for the dude who I've seen watch troll Brokeback Mountain three times in the past week."

The back of your neck flashes with heat. "Shut the fuck up," you snap at him, and Strider's face finally breaks into a self-satisfied looking smirk. "At least I'm doing something productive and educational with my time. You're sitting around on your bulgebone creating disgrace after fucking disgrace to the name of modern architecture out of tinned carrots."

"Did you seriously just call fucking Brokeback Mountain educational?" he speaks slowly, words stringing together in a drawl that's somewhat reminiscent of the way people talk in the human Western movies you've been forced to sit through by him a few times, but not quite all the way there. "Jesus Christ, dude. That's rich."

"I like how you didn't even try to refute my point about how embarrassing this 'Can Town' of yours is."

"Yeah, 'cause it was a fucking stupid point." Strider sighs, pushing his glasses a little farther up his nose. For a second, you're so compelled to ask him why the fuck he bothers wearing sunglasses when the entirety of the meteor is in near-perpetual gloom you can feel your mouth opening, but then he speaks again. "Look, how long are we gonna do this for? 'Cause I've got some seriously pressing administrative shit to get back to in the business sector if you're gonna take a long time with this?"

You blink. Pointedly. "With what?"

"Asking me if you can help build Can Town."

The back of your neck burns again. "I was not going to ask that."

"Dude." His eyebrows are in danger of disappearing into his hairline at this point. They're the only part of his face that moves when he talks; the rest of it stays solid, blank, completely expressionless in a way that is oddly infuriating to you. "This is embarrassing."

"Oh, shut up."

"Cool. Good talk, bro." He turns on his heel, cape fluttering out behind him. You resist the infantile urge to reach out and yank it, settling instead for jamming your hands deep into your pockets and scowling as Strider retreats back into the heart of Can Town. For a second, you think that's just it, and you've legitimately blown your only decent shot at entertainment for the next fuck-knows how long you have left here, but then he pauses right before disappearing behind one of the stacks of cans and turns to look at you. You think. It's hard to tell with the shades.

"We need to bolster the residential section on the east side of town," he says. "Supplies are wherever the fuck you can find them. If you screw anything up, I'm gonna put you in a doomed timeline."

And then he rounds the corner, his cape whipping behind him. You stand there for a second, completely and utterly at a loss on how to feel, before following.

_(you find karkat in the doorway one afternoon, a hand resting on the frame, nails visibly biting into the wood. he doesn't turn as you come up behind him, but you can tell by the way the line of his jaw hardens just a little that he notices you're there, can feel you watching him. after a second, he steps back, relinquishing his death grip on the door frame. it's hard to see clearly in the perpetual gloom, but you're pretty sure that, given a little more light, you'd be able to see marks on the wood his nails had left._

_"hi," you say, mostly to break the silence. karkat is half looking at you, half looking through you, like you're some irritating film over the greater picture he's trying to get a glimpse of, nothing more. you're not sure if it's a species-wide thing for trolls or just something about karkat in particular, but you always get the distinct sensation that he's seeing straight into your head whenever he looks at you, and it creeps you the fuck out at the best of times._

_you're not sure if you'd call this the worst, per se, but you do get the feeling that you've walked into something you shouldn't have here, intruded on some sort of sacred private moment the dude was having. the doorway to literally the only place either of you go outside the common room and your respective bedrooms probably isn't the best place to have such a moment, sure, so you can hardly be blamed for accidentally butting in on shit here, but still._

_the but still hangs a little heavier in your mind than you're accustomed to. in front of you, karkat blinks once, long and slow._

_"hi?" you try again, because what the hell. "earth to vantas? come in commander?"_

_he blinks again, jerking his head a little like a dog shaking off water. you watch the lucidity seep back into him, his gaze sharpening into a glare. there's a weird moment when the two of you move in perfect sync: he pulls away from the door, squaring his shoulders to face you fully and you step back out of instinct in perfect timing. raising your hands in some halfhearted attempt at placation even before the dude opens his mouth to speak._

_"the fuck are you doing here?" he says—snaps, really—and he sounds mad, but no more mad than usual. you feel yourself relax, and then wonder why the fuck you got so tense in the first place. and then figure you don't really care to answer that._

_"it's a free meteor, dude. sorry if i interrupted your melodramatic threshold soliloquy. feel free to carry on. i can grab some popcorn."_

_his expression darkens considerably, taking on an edge that lets you know you're doing something wrong here. you're not sure whether this makes you want to laugh or step back more, so you settle for rocking back and forth on your heels for a second._

_"real funny," karkat finally says. "fucking comedian, aren't we?"_

_and then he's gone, brushing past you and stomping down the hallway, boots echoing against the concrete, leaving you standing in his place. you register his absence for a second—a blip in the fabric of space-time around you, it almost feels like—but then the feeling passes, and you're left jamming your hands into your pockets, watching the outline of his horns fade into the distance.)_

Your first team meeting is a total and complete unmitigated disaster. 

Really, you’re not totally sure what you were expecting. Between the two of them, Vriska and Rose both have enough personality sink a fucking battleship; add that to the fact that you’re about one hundred and fifty percent certain they’re both doing as much as they physically can to show off to Terezi and Kanaya respectively, and they make it five minutes into the meeting before they’re inches away from each other’s throat. 

Maybe only four. God damnit.

“If you could cooperate for ten consecutive seconds, Vriska, we might actually get somewhere here.” Rose is sitting at the head of the table you’re all camped around, hands folded tightly in front of her. Twenty days ago, you were watching her descend from the sky in a blaze of green, newly-minted God Tier robes fluttering in the breeze around her. Now she’s trying to organize a schedule for cleaning the bathrooms on the meteor you’re all going to be stuck on for the next sweep and a half. 

You wonder if she sees it as a fall from grace—only because you do, and you sort of feel like you’re going crazy for thinking that way, which is something of a moot point; you went crazy upward of two sweeps ago, this is just the aftermath—but then Vriska starts talking, and all intelligent thought you once possessed curls up and dies in the back of you thinkpan.

“I am cooperating, actually,” she announces, tone lofty. She has her feet in Terezi’s lap, who does not look at all bothered by the positioning, and it makes you want to die a lot more than is appropriate, but whatever. You’re working on it. “I’m floating other options to the group.”

“Actually, you’re just being a pain in the ass.”

“Okay, well, you’re being a control freak, so.”

“My god, you just—”

“The girls are fighting,” says a voice in your ear all of a sudden. You flinch out of your skin and shoot Dave a glare as he settles down into the chair beside you, flipping it around so he can rest his head on the back, hands folded underneath his chin.

“You’re late,” you point out. “Didn’t you read my memo? I said to be here ten minutes after lunch.”

Dave bobs his head, eyebrows raising to his hairline. “Totally, man. You know, it was actually really considerate of you to send that thing out when you did.”

You frown. “What? Why?”

“You see.” He moves his head so he can spread his hands out in front of him. “I was having a real hard time conking out, you know? All this meteor air really does a doozy on your sleeping schedule, I guess. So I was just about to scrap the whole thing and go make some sick beats or bother the fuck out of Rose for a couple of hours when, lo and behold, I get a message in my Pesterchum inbox from you. And straight up, dude, it was insane. I got, like, five sentences into the memo and then my brain just turned off and I passed the fuck out.” His teeth flash in a grin. “You started talking about the sanctity of team bonding and I just went lights out in an instant.”

You resist the urge to slap him upside the head. It’s an impressive feat. “Real fucking funny,” you mutter. “You been practicing that line all morning?”

“Your jealousy at my advanced and unsurpassed comedy is showing,” is all he says in response. Then, “How come we’re all stuck on the Vriska-and-Rose-antagonizing-the-fuck-out-of-each-other express right now? I thought this was your meeting, or whatever.”

Across the table, Rose is gripping her coffee mug like she wants to throw it. Vriska’s got the exact sort of smile plastered across her face that tells you things might get really ugly, really fast.

You look for something inside you that cares—about the fighting, about the fact that you’re not at the center of it. You can feel it somewhere inside of you, a phantom weight swinging in the center of your chest, but you’re honestly too tired to give a shit about it. 

You’re not sure if you like this better, the apathy versus the permanent panic. The answer doesn’t come as soon as you want it to—so, immediately—and this just annoys you more.

So you just shrug, folding your arms across your chest. “Who gives a shit? Even if I was taking control, they’d still be acting like bratty little wigglers. Might as well save me the hassle.”

Dave hums under his breath. “Look at you,” he says. “Less than a month into this shit and you’re already working through your complexes.”

You scowl. “Funny. Also, says you.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

“Don’t.”

He just smirks and swings himself around, standing up to go head to the kitchen. Even though Rose and Vriska are barreling towards the territory of a screaming match with each other, the sound of Dave clattering around in the background, mumbling under his breath as he searches the cabinets for food is somehow the loudest one in the room.

_(fifteen minutes into the meeting and karkat’s on his feet, arms windmilling about as he shouts top-volume at everyone around the table. five minutes ago, when he started getting pissed, you were snickering into your hand. now your heart feels hard in your chest as karkat’s glare sweeps around to burn straight through you._

_“i’m trying to help you stupid motherfuckers,” he snarls. “i’m trying to save all your asses. don’t you get it? don’t you get what’s going to happen?”_

_you’ve seen him pissed, but this is something else, something unbridled and raw, something foreign and yet so familiar it stings the back of your nose._

_“i’m trying to help,” he repeats. “fucking hell, i—”_

_with a snap, his jaw closes. there’s a look in his eyes that you know means he wants to say more, but the only thing he does is give the group another bone-chilling, scathing look, and turn tail to stalk towards the exit._

_“when all of this goes to shit,” he hisses from the doorway, “you better not fucking blame me.”_

_you’re out of your seat before he’s even fully disappeared around the corner, heading out the door after him even as you hear kanaya mutter your name under her breath a few times. she doesn’t get it. you don’t think you do, either—at least not consciously—but you know she doesn’t even more._

_“dude.” he’s halfway down the hall by the time you catch up with him. “karkat, man, wait.”_

_“fuck off,” he spits over his shoulder. “i really do not need your shit right now, okay?”_

_when you were eight years old, your bro sat you down on the beat-up couch in your living room that he had grabbed off the side of the street one summer, and explained to you what being a hero meant. you had been young, tired, hungry, not in the place to fully drink in his words like you think he wanted you to, but the core of the spiel had stuck with you in a way you still haven’t learned how to shake, even as the image of his head body, katana buried in his chest, plays out on loop in the back of your head nowadays. you fuck up, it’s on you, little man,” he had said, one hand clapped own on your shoulder, half-pinning you in place. “and you gotta remember that shit. you gotta take it in and you gotta remember it ‘till the day you fuckin’ die.”_

_“i get it,” you say to karkat now, back in the present. “i—” you swallow. “i get it, okay?”_

_the look he gives you makes you feel like someone’s standing on your chest, cracking your ribcage in two. you don’t know what else to do, so you just stand in silence and let him walk away, down the hallway in silence.)_

You wake up one morning and shuffle into the common room to see Dave on his hands and knees, muttering under his breath as he fumbles around one of the electrical, sockets underneath the table. On the bench above him is a metal board with some funny-looking buttons and discs on it.

You yawn, then frown. Then, when Dave still doesn’t pick up on your presence, clear your throat.

“Hey, sleeping beauty,” he says, voice a little muffled. “I know I’m a hot piece of ass and all, but if you could dial back the staring just a little bit, that’d be great.”

Even though he can’t see it, you roll your eyes to the heavens. Hopefully, he’ll sense the gesture cosmically, or something. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” you ask.

“Clown hunting.” With a grunt, something pops behind him, and Dave straightens up, turning to face you and rocking back on his heels. “The fuck does it look like I’m doing, dude?”

“I don’t know.” You give up watching him and head into the kitchen in search of some breakfast, deciding somewhat idly that if Vriska ate the last of your grubloaf you’re actually going to put her in an airlock and shoot her out into deep space. “Shockingly enough, I don’t ask you shit just to hear me run my mouth.”

“Coulda fooled me.” Dave springs to his feet, picking up the board thingy and setting it down across the table. You watch as he pops his husktop out of his sylladex, sets it down on the table in front of him, and fiddles with the wires poking out from the back of it, brows furrowed with concentration.

There isn’t any grubloaf left, of course, so you settle on reheating some of the coffee and pouring yourself a mug. By the time you reemerge in the common room, Dave’s hooked his husktop up to the board and procured a set of headphones from somewhere. They’re crammed firmly down on his ears and whatever he’s playing is turned up so loud you can hear a tinny thumping noise coming from them from across the room, but his gaze still naps up to focus on you the second you move. Huh. 

“What’d I say about the staring, dude?” he says, hitting the space bar of his husktop. “Kinda freaky.”

“What are you doing?” you ask again.

He seems to give the question some consideration, pushing his shades up his nose and frowning down at his screen for a second. Finally, he shifts to face you again, lips quirking, inscrutable as ever. 

“Mixing,” he says simply.

“Mixing what?”

“Dude.” He waves his hand at the husktop, then the board, then his headphones, eyebrows raised. “What does it look like I’m mixing? Radioactive chemicals?”

“I wish you would,” you mutter under your breath, knocking back a mouthful of coffee. Then, aloud, “You know, if you want me to fuck off and die, you can just say. No need to beat around the bush for my sake.”

“Has anyone ever told you how melodramatic you are?” Dave smashes the space bar of his keyboard some more, left hand moving deftly over the board, pressing buttons and flicking switches and spinning discs. The movement is weirdly mesmerizing. 

You can’t think of a response that has any more eloquence than telling him to go take a long walk off the side of the meteor, so you just grunt into your coffee mug and watch his hands for a few seconds more. You’re about to call it quits and accept your miserable attempt at social interaction for the day as a total and complete failure when Dave hums under his breath a little, drops his hands, and shifts to face you.

“Well?” he says.

“Well, what?”

“You wanna learn?” His head tips to the side. “How to mix, I mean.”

This makes you pause. You raise the coffee mug to your lips again to buy yourself a few seconds of time, studying Dave’s face over the rim. He’s inscrutable on the best of days, a solid block of unrelenting ice on the worst, and try as you might—the fact that you’re even trying in the first place gives you a headache whenever you think about it too much, but whatever—it’s still hard to get a read on him. You don’t detect anything mocking in his face, though, nor does it seem like he’s trying to fuck with you. If anything, the half-smile working its way across his face reads as a little hopeful, if that’s something Dave is even capable of being, and for some reason, it makes your heart skip a beat.

That’s stupid, though. You know how these things work—with Rose and Kanaya joined at the hip, Terezi and Vriska so inseparable they’ve synched up their sleeping schedules down to the minute, and Gamzee fucking around in the ventilation system like the ginormous creep he’s rapidly becoming, Dave’s options for someone to kill time with have been reduced to you and you alone. There’s nothing special about this, and there isn’t any reason you should want there to be, either. You are in the right place at the right time, as is he for you. End of the story.

Still, you can’t fight back the small smile that works its way onto your face as you finally finish your unnecessarily long drink of coffee and lower the mug to speak. “Sure,” you say, heading over to sit down beside him. “Why the hell not.”

_(“hey.”_

_karkat starts a little, looking up from his book with an expression of mild panic that resolves itself in an instant when he catches sight of you. you’re lounging in his doorway, propped up against the frame, feet kicking idly at the carpet in front of you._

_his expression softens, a sign you’ve come to learn reads something like a welcoming smile from him. “hey. what’s up?”_

_before you can think twice about it—which you really should’ve done, like, five days ago when you first had this embarrassing clusterfuck of an idea, but it’s a little late to be coming to that conclusion now—you push yourself up off the frame and cross the room to stand by the desk he’s seated at. feeling oddly as if you are about to deposit a literal atomic bomb on the bench next to him, you pull the purpose for your visit out of your pocket and toss it down next to him._

_your whole face feels warm, which is just about the stupidest thing ever._

_karkat gingerly sets his book aside, frowning. not a what-the-fuck-is-this-shit-get-it-away-from-me type of frown. more of a normal, confused type of frown. you think. you hope._

_“what’s this?”_

_you cough into your shoulder. “mixtape,” you say. “that i made. for you.”_

_he blinks._

_“you listen to it,” you tell him, mostly because you literally have no idea what else to say._

_“i know what a mixtape is,” he says. there’s something about the look on his face that makes your head swim._

_“yeah.” you kick at the ground some more. “just figured i’d give you something to do other than read that garbage all day long.”_

_you nod at the book still open beside him. his gaze stays fixed on the mixtape._

_“right.” he says. then, like he’s moving through molasses, looks up at you, face splitting wide open with the biggest grin you think you’ve ever seen from him. “thanks.”_

_you duck your head, nodding at the ground, neck prickling. “yeah, man. no problem.”)_

One day you arrive at your usual reading spot in the corner of the common room to see Dave lounging across the couch, feet up on the arm. He tips his head upside down as you pull to a stop above him, his face splitting into a grin.

“Morning,” he says. His shades are falling up to his forehead. “All maxed out on your beauty sleep quota?”

“You’re in my spot,” you say.

He nods sagely and folds his hands behind his head. “Dope.”

“Move.”

“Wanna teach me about troll romance?”

For a second, you are completely, unreservedly certain you heard him wrong. Then you realize that, no, no you didn’t, he’s just messing with you, because what other reason could there be for Dave fucking Strider asking for _you_ to teach him about fucking _troll romance?_ Literally none, is what. 

You’d love to articulate all of this to him in as colorful language as possible—seriously, you were hoping to use today to get through the rest of your book and then maybe start on the one Rose recommended, not deal with Dave acting like a bulgebiting little wiggler just because he has no one else to mess with—but for some reason, all the words start piling up in the back of your mouth, and after a moment of conscious effort, the only thing you’re able to spit out is a flat, stupefied-sounding _“what?”_

Dave nods again, shades slipping another inch up his face. If he’s not careful, you’re going to see what his eyes actually look like in a few seconds. The horror. “Yeah. Troll romance. Wanna teach me?”

You blink. Then, “Why the fuck do you want to learn about troll romance?”

Dave shrugs. “Why not?”

“Dave.”

“Seriously.” He flips over onto his stomach, propping his chin up on the back of his hands, feet dangling over the side of the couch. “Figured I might as well get into all that—what’s Rose call it? Cross-cultural sensitivity?” You open your mouth to respond—or to tell him to please fuck off; you haven’t decided which one yet—but he steamrolls on. “Yeah, that. Figured I might as well embroil myself in that sweet, sweet interspecies dialectics, or whatever. Get some tact points under my belt, you know.”

“I don’t think you could be sensitive about anything if you tried,” you say, mostly because you still haven’t figured out if he’s being serious or not and you don’t want to say yes in case he really is just pulling your leg. “Full offense.”

“You’re so mean to me,” he says, faux-pouting in a way that makes you compulsively roll your eyes so hard your vision goes black for a second. “Seriously, man. I’m trying to learn here.”

You fold your arms, hugging your book to your chest. “So you decided to crawl up my ass about it?”

He shrugs again. “Who else? Kanaya’s too busy pretending not to be wildly in love with my sister to focus long enough to answer me asking her what she wants for dinner, never mind give me an extensive breakdown of that batshit-ass romancing system you guys got going on—”

“What was that about tact points again?”

“—TZ would just make some shit up to mess with me, and Vriska would probably punch me in the mouth just for breathing in her general direction. So.” He pulls himself into a sitting position, hugging his knees to his chest. “That leaves you.”

Some off-hand remark about yourself and convenience floats to the top of your thinkpan, totally unbidden. With a grimace you don’t hide nearly as well as you want to, you beat it back down under the water with a stick. Fucking hell. It’s just Dave Strider asking you to teach him about quadrants, not an open invitation to kickstart some internal soliloquy that’s so self-pitying it’ll make you want to do a backflip off the front of the meteor. 

You drag a breath in, hold it, and then release it in a sharp gust. “On a scale from one to ten, how much am I going to regret saying yes to this?”

Dave’s eyebrows wiggle a little over the rims of his glasses. “Only one way to find out.”

Sure enough, you do find out: about fifteen and a half. Three hours later and you have a tension headache so bad it’s making it hard to see straight. Dave looks positively beside himself as he sits and watches you massage the bridge of your nose for the umpteenth time, grinning wider than you think you’ve ever seen him do so before.

“Success?” he says once you’ve straightened up, which only makes you want to start rubbing at your face again.

“Tell me,” you say between gritted teeth, “are you the most insufferable nooksucker in the entire fucking universe because you want to be, or is it a predisposed condition?” Fuck it. You go back to pinching the bridge of your nose. It doesn’t help with the headache, but it makes you feel a little better all the same. “If it’s the latter, I have a follow-up question: is it curable? Please tell me this is curable.”

“Hey, come on.” Dave rocks back and forth for a second, still smiling. “I wasn’t that bad.”

“One more question, actually: have you ever sawn off your own leg before? ‘Cause I feel like that experience might be somewhat comparable to the total fucking shitfest trying to explain auspisticism to you was.”

Dave snorts. “Okay, but other than that, I think I did good.”

You drop your face into your hands with a groan. “You called kismesissitude hate sex, like, seven fucking billion and twelve times.”

“It was probably only like, thirty,” he amends. “Also, is that not literally what it is?”

You groan louder, then push yourself to your feet, heading for the door. “If you need me, I’ll be in my room sleeping for the next sweep straight. Or drowning myself in the absolution block.” 

“Same time tomorrow?” Dave says to your retreating back. You can still hear the grin in his voice.

“Eat shit,” you call over your shoulder. It’s only after you’ve rounded the corner and are safely out of sight that you let your scowl work itself into a smile.

_(“i don’t get it,” he says for the billionth time._

_“cool,” you say, also for the billionth time. honestly, it’s getting fucking ridiculous—you two have never sounded more like broken records than you do now. “i don’t know what the fuck you want me to do about that, dude.”_

_“explain it?” from across the dining table, karkat spreads his hands out in front of him, palms tilted up to the ceiling. he’s looking at you with a baffled sort of incredulity, like you’re refusing to pick up socks you just threw on his bedroom floor, or something equally mundane and stupid. “i’m not messing with you here—”_

_“neither am i—”_

_“i’m genuinely curious about this.” he blinks. “i mean, the last person who tried to walk me through this shit was fucking egbert, and that happened while we were all about six seconds away from dying, so it made about as much sense as lalonde when she’s off her ass from fucking around with the horrorterrors, so.”_

_you have to consciously bite back a grimace. the idea of egbert being the one to walk the trolls through even the most basic cultural difference between the trolls and the humans is enough to make you a little worried; the thought of him trying to explain what the deal is with being gay to them makes your head start hurting in record timing._

_the thought of you having to do that, though. jesus fucking christ._

_“so.” karkat says again, prompting. “i just wanna—”_

_“for the actual six hundredth time, dude, i don’t fucking know, okay?” you spread your hands. “and spoiler alert: i probably won’t have figured it out when you ask me again in two and a half fucking seconds. and here’s another one: still probably won’t have a clue when you ask me again after that. or when you ask me again after that, ‘cause you’re fucking insane like that so i know you will. seeing a pattern here?”_

_he huffs out a sigh, frustration working its way into his expression. “how can you not know why your species doesn’t like homosexuals—”_

_“because it isn’t fucking simple, dude!” your hands itch with the desire to bang them down on the table, which is just dumb, not to mention embarrassing as hell. out of all the shit karkat pulls with you on a daily basis, this is what gets you all worked up? seriously, what the fuck? “it isn’t this black-and-white shit that you just understand right off the bat. like, god, i know you think we’re all dumb as rocks, or whatever, but our shit actually gets kind of complicated sometimes. fucking shocker, huh?”_

_“but you have to have an idea why it bothers people so much.” he looks at you expectantly. for some odd reason, it makes you want to tear your skin off. “right.”_

_“i—”_

_your bro was not a man of many words. his thoughts, feelings, desires, whatever—all of it was communicated through the laundry list of non-verbal tells and cues you somehow managed to memorize over the course of the thirteen years you spent with him. so of course he never sat you down at the kitchen table, looked you in the eyes over the rims of his stupid fucking shades, and said “dave, if it ever turns out that you like dudes, no matter where i am in the world, i’m gonna come back into your life and kick your ass into the next century, okay?” of course he didn’t. expecting that sort of shit from him would be out of pocket to an unprecedented degree._

_but he also never said out loud that he liked making smuppet videos, or playing call of duty on his xbox, or beating your ass into the concrete every other day, but he did all of that often enough for you to ascertain pretty easily that he very much did. and yeah, okay, the two of you never once had so much as an exchange of glances over the topic of dudes who wanna mack on other dudes, but you don’t have to be albert fucking einstein to figure out what his take on that would’ve been: no bueno, little man._

_no fucking bueno._

_and it’s hard. it’s just fucking hard, walking out of thirteen years of that shit unscathed. it’s hard in a way that makes your stomach hurt, hard in a way that leaves you feeling like the floor’s just been yanked out from underneath your feet, hard in a way you don’t think you’d ever be able to articulate, even if you made like rose and started eating an entire merriam-webster for breakfast._

_it’s hard in a way that makes you want to gather all that shit up, lock it in a little box, and throw that thing down a sinkhole you can feel opening in your chest right now, never to be seen or heard of or thought about again._

_so you do. because everything else is just so fucking hard, and you just want to do the easy thing for once, so you do._

_“—don’t know,” you finish. and then you’re standing up, pushing your chair back, moving away from the table before karkat can even so much as take a breath in response. “i don’t know, dude. end of story.”)_

“This is stupid.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic observation, Strider. I like how you've made the exact same one, like, eighty times in the past twenty minutes."

"That's an exaggeration. We've been watching this for one hour, sixteen minutes, and—”

"Okay, Knight of fucking Time, tell me where I asked—”

"Like—" Dave cuts himself off to reach across you and make a grab for the popcorn bowl you'd tried to corral into your corner of the couch. You swat halfheartedly at his arm and he jabs your shin with his foot in response, pulling the bowl into his lap. Your protestations start to get a lot less halfhearted. "Like—oh my god, dude, can you fucking— _get off_ —what are you, five?"

"I'm six, you dumb shit."

"You _what?"_ One of his hands is wrapped tight around your wrist, holding your arm just shy of the popcorn. His grip is vice-like, thumb pressing into the exact right spot that sends wave after wave of buzzes up what feels like the very center of your bone, and a half-formed question about where the fuck he learned to do that rises up in the back of your throat before it's beaten down by Dave talking again. "Oh, right. You mean in, like, weird troll years, or whatever."

"They're called sweeps, you ignoramus—"

"Did you seriously just call me a fucking _ignoramus?"_ Dave, nails still biting into your wrist, throws his head back to toss a piece of popcorn up into his mouth. He misses, the kernel bouncing off the rims of his glasses, landing somewhere between the cushions. You don't bother to bite back a snort, and he gives your arm a painful twist. "Rose, if this is some weird, Lovecraftian manifestation shit you're trying out with poor Karkat's unconscious body, I'm gonna be so pissed."

"I'm not Rose, idiot." With a jerk of your arm, you finally shake his hand off. "God, _ow_. Cut your fucking nails, please."

Dave smirks, wiggling the fingers on one hand at you as he reaches for another piece of popcorn with the other. "Stop deflecting. Ignoramus?"

"Want me to call you a stupid fuck instead?"

"Honestly?" Dave leans back into his respective corner of the couch, lacing his fingers behind his head. "That shit packs some punch at least. ignoramus makes you sound like you just shit a dictionary out with your last good meal or something."

"Stop." You roll your eyes as much as physically possible. "I'm blushing."

"This is stupid, though." Dave leans back to try and catch another piece of popcorn in his mouth. He's successful this time, congratulating himself with a double fist pump and a grin that cracks his face in two for a split second.

"Wanna say that one more time for me? I don't think I fully processed it the first fifty times you told me that. Maybe one more repetition and it will really hit home.”

Dave just smirks, eyebrows cocking upwards over the rims of his sunglasses. You resist the oddly-sharp urge that washes over you all of a sudden to swipe them off his face, knock them to the floor so you can see what he really looks like.

You don’t care what he really looks like. Obviously. That would be weird and stupid and beside the point—Dave isn’t Dave without the shades. They’re just as much a part of him as anything else is. And, really, genuinely, it’s not something you could force yourself to give a shit about even if you tried. All you want to do right now is finish the goddamn movie in peace. 

Which you do. Dave shuts up, miraculously so, and it’s only because of the unprecedented ness of this gesture that you can’t help but look over at him every couple of minutes. You tell yourself first it’s to make sure he isn’t mocking all the characters on the screen like he did the last time you made him watch a troll romcom; then you tell yourself it’s to make sure he isn’t asleep.

He isn’t. He’s sitting up, ramrod straight, hands folded together on his knees as he eyes the screen in silence. The light from the TV pools around him, lighting his face up a dull grayish-blue, the scars across his jaw and cheeks glowing off-white. After a while, you give up the pretense of side-eyeing him—you’ve seen this movie a thousand times at this point; skipping out on one watch to study your weird alien friend in peace for a bit won’t hurt anyone—and openly fix your gaze on him. You sit there, chin propped up against the crook of your arm, studying the reflection patterns dancing across the frames of his glasses, and it's only when Dave reaches over to the table in front of the couch to grab the remote and press pause that you realize you haven't been paying attention for the last ten minutes, at least.

"I don't get it," he says, and you spend all of two seconds getting worked up again before realizing he sounds genuinely curious now. "Why doesn't the blue troll just tell the other one he's in love with him, huh?"

He gestures passionately at the screen; you follow the motion his hand cut through the air like your eyes are super-glued to him.

"Why doesn't he just tell him?" Dave repeats, and suddenly this feels like a question you will never be able to answer him.

You grab the remote from where it sits next to him, hyper-aware of the way your fingertips brush against the side of his leg, and hit play, the audio kicking back in with a blast of static. You don't look at Dave for the rest of the movie. You're not entirely sure why.

_("why don't you just tell him?"_

_you think she might be mocking you. you want to think that, at least, because then it gives you free rein to respond with whatever piece of snarky horseshit you can conjure to mind first, but you know that's not the case; if rose's question isn't a genuine one, then it's at the very least deliberate, if rhetorical all the same._

_if already answered for her, for him, for everyone on this stupid, shitty, miserable, cold-as-fucking-balls space rock except for you, because the real reasoning behind all this—the awkwardness, the painful avoidance, the minimum six inches of space you keep between you and karkat at all times—is sitting locked in a box somewhere stored in the very pit of your chest._

why don't you just tell him _, rose's eyes seem to ask again as you turn from examining the contents of the fridge to look at her, though she could very well be saying_ why are you such a coward _. or she could just be looking at you with nothing but pity, plain and simple, no hidden meaning or held-back tirade within her gaze. you're honestly not sure which one is worse._

_"i don't know what you're talking about." the back of your neck burns. you can hear something hissing from within the appliance; a loose pipe, you think at the same time as your brain offers up the image of glowing blue eyes and orange-and-white pinstripes and a beat-up grey snapback. "so. uh."_

_"dave," rose says, and there's the pity, loud and clear. it makes your stomach ache._

_"rose," you echo, because you are tired, because you are not good at this, because she is going to ask something of you that you do not know how to give her—how to give anyone. "are we playing the name game now?"_

_the look she gives you is sad. behind you, the fridge light flickers.)_

“You know, I can’t help but think it’s funny.”

With a barely-stifled groan, you drag your gaze away from the keyboard you have in front of you, fingers still arranged in one of the chord shapes Dave drilled into your memory, and look up. 

Rose—because who else would start a tirade with _you know_ in that exact sort of self-important tone, really?—stands a few feet in front of you, coffee mug cradled in her hands, knitting tucked under her arm. There’s something about the way she’s looking at you that makes you both jumpy and annoyed at the same time—well, jumpier and more annoyed than the way she looks at you normally does, anyway—and you have to focus really, really hard on not letting any choice comments about where she can stick those needles slip out of your mouth.

Instead, you just sigh. Beside you, Dave hits pause on the track and pulls his headphones down around his neck.

“What’s funny,” you say, hoping your tone directly translates your words into something along the lines of _please, please, pretty please fuck off right now._

Rose blinks. Her smile is thin-lipped. She’s not looking at you, you realize; her gaze is going right through Dave, practically skewering him to the wall behind you. He looks mildly like he doesn’t want to be there which, given the fact that extracting any sort of genuine emotional expression from him is like trying to get a rock to bleed sometimes, you take to mean he’s about six seconds from throwing himself off the side of the meteor.

“Oh, you know.” Rose’s gaze is shot full of ice. Your memory is made hazy with sopor slime at the weird half-thoughts, half-dreams you sometimes have right before conking out that always leave your skin crawling, but now that you really think about it, don’t you remember yelling breaking out from Dave’s room last night? Yelling that sounded an awful lot like it was coming from none other than the girl staring daggers at Dave beside you now? “Right?”

You suddenly get the distinct impression that you are intruding on something here. You go to stand—because honestly, fuck this; you’re as bored as the next motherfucker on this rock, but even you aren’t so desperate for entertainment that you’re willing to sit through Rose vs. Dave Round Two—but then Rose’s gaze snaps up to you, pinning you in place.

“You and Dave,” she says, and she sounds almost normal, save for the visceral look in her eyes. “It’s nice to see you two becoming so close.”

Dave is still staring directly into his husktop like he wants it to eat him alive, so you figure that leaves the burden of interacting with Rose to be vested on your shoulders now. Great. “Uh,” you say, nothing short of impressive in your total, complete lack of eloquence. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

“Proximity does wonders, does it not?” She blinks. “I wonder what it would be like, sometimes, if we were all still forced to interact through such technical interfaces as Trollian or Pesterchum. Certainly I can imagine the trajectory of my relationship with Kanaya would be severely altered.”

She spits out _relationship_ like it’s a mouthful of glass, her gaze flashing over to Dave for a second. You make the mental note to ask the dude what the actual fuck he said to her yesterday that pissed her off so much, because holy _shit_ . And you thought Rose got mad at _Vriska_ during team meetings sometimes. 

“Yeah.” You nod, fixing your gaze on her left shoulder. “I can, uh, imagine.”

“I’m sure you can.” Her gaze rakes over you for a second. “A piece of advice, if I may, Karkat?”

You really wish she wouldn’t, but that’s hardly something you can say out loud. So you just shrug.

“Dave has a habit of—oh, how do you say?” She pretends to think about it for all of two seconds, tipping her head up at the ceiling before snapping her gaze back down to drill through you. “Talking out of his ass. Take any criticisms with a grain of salt. Chances are it’s just projection.”

“Jesus Christ, Rose,” Dave mutters.

She turns a tight smile on him. “Just saving the two of you future grief. After all, you seem more than willing to offer up commentary on other people’s relationships on this meteor; I only assumed such course of action meant your own entanglements were up for similar amounts of scrutiny.” The smile beams back to you. “Not that there’s any relationship to scrutinize here, I’m certain.”

You blink. And then again. “Uh.”

Her smile, if possible, tightens. “Quite,” she says, and then with that, turns on her heel and stalks out of the room. 

You make sure she’s fully left the premise before turning to Dave, a half-formed _what the fuck, dude?_ already ready to fall from your lips. But he’s already turned his attention back to the husktop, hands dancing across the keypad, headphones pressed down firmly over his ears again.

You let yourself deliberate for a moment: press him or let it be. Your instinct is to go with the first, but then you remember that as totally fucking lame and sad as it sounds, there really isn’t anything for you on this meteor other than spending time with him nowadays. You’d be Alternia’s certified biggest idiot if you were to fuck that up over some weird human sibling spat.

So you just put your own headphones back on, and with only a little bit of a bitter taste in the back of your throat, get back to mixing.

_(after seven days, five hours, and sixteen minutes of not exchanging a single word, karkat finally corners you in the kitchen._

_you’re just fishing off your daily food hunt, arms full of shitty granola bars and a packet of cereal you’re really hoping no one will strangle you in your sleep for taking when you step back and almost run headlong into him. fucking hell. coming up on a year stuck on this stupid, stupid meteor, and this dude still has yet to grasp even the vague idea of personal space._

_“hey,” you say to his knee, suddenly acutely aware of how long it’s been since the two of you have talked, and even more acutely aware of the fact that, should he ask—and being real, you know he’s bound to ay some point—you will have literally no defensible answer to the question of where the fuck you’ve been for the past week at the ready. “uh, ‘sup.”_

_“should i pretend i give a fuck about the pleasantries, or is it okay if i dive right into it?” he asks, his tone making it very clear that he is actually not at all interested in hearing an answer from you. “personally, i’d like to just jump right in, but i’m more than open to any amendments from you.”_

_you set the cereal down. somehow, it feels redundant in all of this._

_“look—”_

_“why the fuck are you avoiding me?”_

_yep, no answer. right on the money with your predictions, as always. fucking great._

_“look,” you try again, raking a hand through your hair. god. you could use a shower. “it’s not—”_

_“i swear to fucking god, strider, if the next words that come out of your mouth right now are ‘it’s not a you thing,’ i might actually have an aneurysm.”_

_“promise?”_

_joking is probably not the route to go down here at all, but it’s a welcome surprise to see karkat’s expression crack into a smile, even if it’s a tired, frustrated one at that._

_“you’re such a dickhead,” he says, and there’s a funny note to his voice that makes you feel like you’ve just been kicked down a flight of stairs. emotionally._

_“ten points for the human lingo,” you say. “rose would be proud.”_

_“don’t do that again.” he shakes his head, hair flopping into his eyes. it’s getting longer now, curling around the edges of his jaw, sticking up all funny in the back. you wonder if he would let you cut it into a mullet, or something, just to see how hysterical that would look. you make a mental note to ask him that later. “okay?”_

_“you probably loved the break,” you say, because you cannot deal with the way he’s looking at you right now, actually, and answering the question runs too close to acknowledging that. “got to finally do something other than hang out with my ass 24/7 for once.”_

_“i hang out with your stupid ass because i fucking want to,” he says—snaps, almost. you’re starting to remember just how long a week actually is, even when you’re stuck on a meteor for another two years hurtling through the most miserable recesses of deep space. “as much of an annoying, insufferable, and all-around bone-headed prick you are, it’s not like i have shit else to do.”_

_“aw. stop. i’m blushing.”_

_“don’t,” he says again, and there’s something about the intensity to his voice that makes you look up, just for a split second. he looks more serious than you’ve seen from him in a long, long time. “okay?”_

_it feels too much like you’re promising something else, but you can’t help yourself all the same. you nod to the tune of the voice in the back of your head screaming at you to fuck off for another week, and then another fifty-one of them for good measure._

_“okay. okay, dude.”)_

There is no change, really, between Dave before and after he “comes out.” 

You’re not even sure what the phrase means—Rose tries to break it down for you one night, but either she’s feeling particularly sanctimonious, or you’re just not in the mood, so the definition goes way over your head without you even realizing it—apart from the bare bones: because of the frankly baffling amount of taboo the since-obliterated human species put on their concept of same-gender attraction, people of that inclination are forced to go through these emotionally taxing ordeals in which they bear their soul repeatedly to anyone in their life they value even just a little and confess their big secret. 

Dave does not bear his soul. Dave does not even confess to you, not in any notable way, at least. He is the same as you’ve always known him; the only change is now, instead of instinctively raising his hackles at even the vaguest mention of homosexuality in his general direction, he just doesn’t seem to give much of a shit about it anymore.

“Why should I?” he counters when you bring this up to him one day. “I mean, god knows how long I spent agonizing over this shit while I was still working through it, or whatever. Doesn’t make a lotta sense for me to keep getting freaked out over it after the fact too.”

You give him a quizzical look. He heaves a sigh in response.

“Look,” he says, spreading his hands. “I’m cool with who I am. I’m cool with where I’m at. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all, like, t-minus twenty months from what honestly could be total and complete extermination. Feels like there are bigger things to give myself a tension headache thinking about all the time than who I wanna mack on, you know?”

You do. Sort of. At any rate, he seems happy, happier than you’ve seen him in a long time, and it’s hard not to have that rub off on you. So you just let it happen.

“It was kinda a doozy, honestly,” he tells you later, in one of his more articulate moments. “Working through it all, I mean.”

On the couch beside him, you nod like you get it. Sometimes you think you do, sometimes you don’t. It’s not a linear concept between your species, but you’ve found some common ground. And him talking about, really sitting down and baring his soul in a way that you didn’t think he even knew how to do—let alone would give you the privilege of sitting by and watching—helps. It helps a lot, sometimes in ways you're not fully able to articulate. 

“There was a lot of—” He waves a hand around vaguely. “—shit to get through. From Bro, mostly, but from people in general. I don’t think I noticed how much I drank up the rhetoric that was floating around my house or my school or wherever until I got here and, like, had the space to take a step back and actually look at myself and who I was, you know?”

You nod again. “You internalize it,” you say simply. 

Dave nods back. “Yeah. Pretty much it, really.”

Something flickers across his face, too fast for you to catch, try as you might. Before you can think twice, you shift, leaning slightly so you can press your knee to his in silence. After a second of pause, he presses back.

_(the first time you kiss him, the two of you are standing in a storage closet like every single shitty high school coming-of-age movie trope rolled into one. except for it isn’t, not really, because instead of seven minutes in heaven, the two of you are currently entrenched in an extensive game of seven minutes in how-long-are-you-going-to-keep-looking-for-that-fucking-extension-cord-before-you-get-bored-and-give-up—you say this joke to karkat after a few minutes of searching, and he gives you an annoyed enough look for you to know he found it appropriately funny. also, you aren’t in high school. also, you’re pretty sure high school isn’t a thing that exists anymore. also, you’re both dudes._

_you’re pretending to be a lot less freaked out about the last one than you really are. fake it till you make it, you guess. whatever. whatever, really. it’s a process. you know this._

_“okay, i don’t know about you,” karkat says, voice muffled as he roots around one of the storage cupboards, “but i’m about five more minutes from giving up on this and just getting vriska to move the couch closer to the socket.”_

_“she’s not gonna do that, dude,” you point out, half-heartedly turning a cardboard box over and peering at the dusty, extension-cord-less inside for a second. “she looks at you like she’s reenacting fifty shades of duking it out on karkat’s ass every time you ask her to pass the salt at dinner.” you throw a smirk over your shoulder at him. he parries with an eye-roll of galactic proportions. ah, familiarity. “ literally what about any of that makes you think she's going to drop everything and start moving furniture around for you?”_

_“i don’t know,” he huffs. “maybe i’ll ask really nicely, or something.”_

_you snort. he gives you a baleful glare._

_“that was funny,” you say, copying his stance. in the cramped quarters of the closet—ha, ha—you’re so close to him you can feel his breath on your face. on second thoughts, maybe your life_ is _a composite of shitty high school coming-of-age movie tropes. “tell another one.”_

_he sniffs. pointedly. “you think you’re such a fucking comedian, huh?”_

_“yeah.” you grin. “pretty much.”_

_and it’s such a painfully_ karkat _thing to say—god, it’s not even funny, for fuck’s sake, except it is, because it’s fucking karkat—that, for a second, you don’t even know how to respond. you just stand there staring at him, a stupid grin undeniably working its way across your face. he half opens his mouth, probably to ask you why the fuck you’re looking at him like that—a good question, a great question, one you would totally answer were it not for the weird pressure that’s started to build in the center of your chest that’s making it a little hard to talk—when, before you can so much as think once about it, never mind twice, you lean over and kiss him._

_on the mouth. you kiss karkat vantas on the mouth._

_panic, white-hot, serrated and razor-sharp, makes you pull back almost a second after. suddenly, your heart is pounding throughout every inch of your body and your blood is roaring in your ears and it’s around your tongue that suddenly feels like it’s made of lead that you’re able to spit out: “oh, i—that was—that was totally outta pocket, dude, i—just—fucking—you know what, uh, pretend that—pretend i didn’t—”_

_“wait,” he mutters, hand snaking out to wrap around your wrist even as you’re staggering back, every single alarm bell sounding at you to get the fuck out of here_ right now _. “dave—”_

_“i’m sorry, i—”_

_“stop,” he says, nails biting into your wrist, and then he kisses you._

_your hands jump to the sides of his face without even a sliver of conscious prompting. one of his slides to rest at the base of your neck, then the back of your skull, the other loosely fisting a handful of the cape he treats making fun of you for like an olympic sport. you back into the wall, awkwardly, cardboard boxes and dust bunnies kicked aside in reckless abandon. he kisses you and your brain goes white, senses dulling and sharpening in dizzying conjuncture with one another, coherent train of though veering off the track in the literal best way possible. he kisses you and you’re kissing him and you’re kissing him and you’re kissing him and—_

_oh my fucking god, you’re kissing him._

_“you’re so fucking stupid,” he says when he pulls back—too soon, you can’t help but think, way too fucking soon. you’re both panting a little, the sound loud in the suddenly stifling quiet of the room. his hand is still cupping the back of your head, fingers threading through your hair. he looks exasperated and irritated and fond and something else, something you’re not sure you know the word for, and there is nothing you want to do more than to take this moment and freeze it, distill it into some tangible form and sew it to the inside of your pocket so you’ll never lose it, no matter how hard you try. you want to stay in this stupid, shitty storage closet on this stupid, shitty meteor for the rest of your life._

_you also, amidst a gnawing sense of panic that is not as strong ad it might have once been—process, it’s always going to be a process—want to kiss him again._

_so you do. and again, and again, and again.)_

“Question.”

You look up from the book, turning onto your side so you can see Dave better. He’s lying sprawled out on his back across the rug beside you, tossing a ball up at the ceiling at random intervals. He catches the thing with on hand before turning to look at you, lips quirking.

“What?” you say.

“Do you think we spend too much time together?”

You’re inclined to think that he’s fucking with you for a second—you still are, more often than not when it comes to him; you’ve watched Dave get a handle on a lot of things since starting this trip, from learning how to turn on a laundry machine to being able to open the fridge without getting a look on his face like he wants the ground to swallow up where he stands, but sincerity is still something that comes and goes for him. But raised eyebrows and half-smirk like he knows something you don’t aside, there’s something about him that reads as completely serious, more so than he gets around you most of the time.

Maybe it’s just gut feeling. Maybe just projection. Who knows, really.

You set the book aside and roll onto your stomach, propping your head up on your arms. Dave goes back to throwing the ball, but you can tell by the way the side of your face closest to him prickles that he’s still watching you, still waiting.

You think. Really, truly, you lie there and think. By now, you have spent coming up on half a sweep on this meteor, half a sweep with your days rapidly starting to revolve around him. Half a sweep of knowing him not as this abstract concept—Egbert’s best bro or Kanaya’s flushcrush’s weird human brother—but as this real thing, a tangible person always hovering in your periphery no matter what direction you turn your head in. By now, you know his favorite movie, his favorite song, his favorite beat pattern to set up whenever he wants to mix something. You know the way he takes his coffee in the morning and what cereal kinds he’ll glare daggers at Rose for alchemizing and what Pop-tart flavor he thinks is the best. You know where he goes when he disappears for three days on end, and you know why he disappears in the first place. You know about the granola bars stored under his bed, about the baseball bat he keeps under his pillow, about double-padlock on his door. You know what he wants to do with himself if you make the one-in-a-million shot of you all getting out of this alive, and you know what he’s doing to prepare himself for missing that chance. 

Your socks are on his bedroom floor, his cape on yours. There’s an ever-growing pile of mixtapes stacked up on the corner of your desk, a series of photos he’s taken himself pinned above your recuperacoon. You keep a pillow and a blanket in your room, rolled up into a little ball on your couch, for the nights he decides to crash in your room. He keeps a stack of your favorite books under his bed. 

Your lives are wrapped up in one another, sometimes so inexorably it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, and though you know there’s a part of you that should be worried about this—after all, certain doom is drawing closer with every single day, an ever-brightening speck on the distant horizon; it would be poor form to only now start getting your hopes up—you can’t find it in yourself to be.

Not even in the slightest.

“No,” you say aloud, and he stops throwing the ball again to look over sat you. “Not really. I mean, if it isn’t you, who else?”

The double entendre is about as subtle as a brick to the stomach even though you didn’t mean it in the first place. Well, you did, maybe, but you definitely didn’t mean to say it out loud. Not like that, at least.

Well.

“Yeah,” Dave says, then laughs. “Who else?”

He rolls back and resumes his game of catch. You pick the book back up and turn to the page you left off on. After a few moments of silence, something flickers in your periphery—always on the periphery, always there, no matter where you’re looking—and you glance up to see a slow smile working its way across Dave’s face.

Yeah, okay, certain doom and all, but you have the sneaking suspicion that maybe this is worth getting your hopes up for.

You look back down at your book, and you smile, too. 


End file.
